THIS MUST HAVE BEEN PAINFUL: Snopes Admits Obama Built Cages for Immigrant Children. “Snopes couldn’t find a way to clear the Obama administration on this one, and had no choice but to rate the claim as true. . . . Of course when you have two former Obama administration officials (Obama’s DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson, and executive associate director of ICE Thomas Homan) both on the record on the issue, in addition to media reporting at the time it’s really hard to claim anything to the contrary. Last year, Snopes also had to admit that the Obama administration placed immigrant children with human traffickers. I’m sure that wasn’t an easy admission for them either, especially since concerns about human trafficking are why children are separated from adults in the first place.”
Archive for 2019
July 3, 2019
COMEBACK? Tesla breaks quarterly record with 95,200 delivered cars.
This is a significant increase from the company’s own milestone of delivering 90,700 cars in a single quarter, which Tesla had achieved in the fourth quarter of 2018.
The news is doubly important as it comes after a bad first quarter for Tesla, in which the company’s deliveries faltered and the company incurred massive losses.
Tesla says it produced a total of 87,048 cars and delivered 95,200 cars in Q2. There was also an additional 7,400 vehicles in transit at the end of the quarter, and these deliveries will spill into the third quarter.
But: “It should be noted that June 30 was the last day to get a $3,750 federal tax credit towards a Tesla purchase in the U.S., which surely contributed to the results above. Starting July 1, the credit is cut by half, to $1,875, and in 2020 it will disappear completely.”
THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Democratic Deputy Chair Keith Ellison Meets With Far-Left U.K. Leader Accused Of Anti-Semitism.
Related: If you’re wondering why so few Democrats condemned Antifa’s Saturday attack on journalist Andy Ngo in Portland, in January of last year, the Washington Free Beacon reported “Ellison Posts Photo of Himself Posing With ‘Antifa’ Handbook, Says It Will ‘Strike Fear’ in Trump.” Ellison must have just deleted this tweet, since it was still up in the Google cache:
THE MORE THINGS CHANGE: Archduke Karl von Habsburg proposed as President of the European Commission.
JUNIOR DEMAGOGUES-IN-TRAINING GOTTA DEMAGOGUE: Hispanic pastors tour border facilities, expose AOC as a fraud: ‘Shocked by misinformation.’
According to a group of pastors who toured the same facilities last Friday, what they saw looked nothing like the macabre picture painted by AOC.
“We found no soiled diapers, no deplorable conditions and no lack of basic necessities,” pastor Rev. Samuel Rodriguez revealed during a press conference Monday, adding that when he asked officials whether they’d staged the facilities to look nice, they said no.
“I asked whether or not this was all being staged — did they just pivot based upon the reporting, did they shift things, did they make modifications in order to accommodate or to respond to the reporting?” he said. “They unequivocally denied it. What they stated was that every condition we were witnessing was the identical condition in the center when the attorneys arrived.”
Related: AOC Weeps Over Empty Parking Lot.
WAS IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. PRO LIFE EQUALS LYNCHING? Warning from the Washington Post: Liberals Find Alabama So ‘Embarrassing.’ “The Washington Post on Tuesday made it pretty clear: The paper isn’t a big fan of conservative Alabama. Writer Karen Heller penned a 2500 word essay citing all the liberals embarrassed by the state. The story somehow connected the south’s horrific history of lynching with the newly-passed pro-life legislation.”
GOING… GOING… First One Out? John Hickenlooper Bleeding Staff, Losing Money, Pressured to Drop Out.
It’s telling that the Democrat who came out most forcefully against socialism might be the first one out.
IT’S A PROPER PRE-FOURTH OF JULY FISKING FROM JAMES LILEKS:
If I see a piece in Vox or Slate or Salon or Slatox that tut-tuts about something men do for the usual stupid unexamined manly reasons, I always check the byline: if it’s a guy, it’s often someone whose twitter bio has pronouns, pissy egotistical snark for the last line, and a picture of himself – glasses, always black-rimmed glasses — making an expression of faux joy and surprise – if it’s about games or movies or comic books or other . . . youthful pursuits, shall we say. That sort rarely ventures out of the pop-culture bubble, though. When it comes to Cars or Steaks or Guns they’re usually out of their element.
If the byline suggests the author is a woman – you cannot be certain, and off to Twitter jail if you assume — then I am filled with red rage. How — how can they presume to know? How dare they femalesplain? Do they not know that membership in one gender absolutely forbids you from making assumptions or statements or observations about the other?
Do I even need to add the obligatory “read the whole thing” tag at this point?
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Female athlete alleges retaliation by coach because her mother complained about transgender policy.
“THIS WOULD BE SO CALIFORNIA-HILARIOUS IF IT DIDN’T AFFECT THE HEALTH OF MILLIONS OF ITS CITIZENS:” Uh-huh: To save water, L.A. pays folks to tear out lawns that fight smog costing billions.
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS: George Soros and Charles Koch Have Teamed Up to Form a Think Tank.
SPYING AND PRYING: UChicago SUED for providing Google with sensitive patient data.
AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases – Updated Every Hour.
TURKISH NEO-SULTAN ERDOGAN THREATENS TO GO TO WAR IN LIBYA: The Turkish president’s threat to intervene in Libya’s anarchic civil war received scant coverage in U.S. media swooning over the Democrats’ gaggle of synthetic candidates. Not so in Europe and the Middle East — for many reasons.
Last week, though his military forces are deeply engaged in next-door Syria’s ruinous civil war, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened to launch a military campaign in another former Turkish Ottoman Empire colonial possession: Libya.
Don’t dismiss the Ottoman link as a quaint historical reference. Ottoman rule influences contemporary Libyan politics in odd but evident ways. Empire connections have some resonance in 21st-century Turkey. Imperial glory may well have psychological import for the authoritarian Erdogan. His nickname is Sultan Recep.
Ottoman Turkey divided its Libyan colony as two provinces, Tripolitania (west) and Cyrenaica (east). In July 2019 an “eastern” army is attacking Tripoli. Indeed, Tripolitania and Cyrenaica are Roman Empire-era names. Italy, a rising power with visions of neo-Roman glory, invaded Libya in 1911, igniting the Turco-Italian War of 1911-1912. The Ottoman Turks –a declining Great Power– withdrew in 1912.
The obscure Turco-Italian War “was the first in an explosive chain of three little wars involving the Ottoman Empire, a declining great power. The First Balkan War (1912-13) and Second Balkan War (1913) followed. In 1914, World War I erupted, with the Balkan “powder keg” supplying the spark.”
Quaint history?
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Democrats MIA Pre-2017 on Humanitarian Crisis. “Now that the Democrats admit there is a crisis at the border, they have shifted to blaming the Trump administration for the crisis. Where were all these humanitarians when the same things were happening under the Obama administration? I don’t believe for one second any of these people really, really care about the children or the migrants in detention because the ‘crisis’ only really, really mattered to them when it could be used for partisan advantage. That’s right, the headline-seeking groups, lawyers, politicians and advocates aren’t outraged about the children or the women or the migrants, they care about getting political gain from their exhibitions.”
Well, yeah.
DIGITAL LIFE: Ebooks Purchased From Microsoft Will Be Deleted This Month Because You Don’t Really Own Anything Anymore.
Microsoft announced in April that it would stop selling ebooks and that any books the company already sold would stop working in early July because the DRM servers were being shut off. Yes, you read that correctly. Those books that you “bought” are going to disappear. Even the “free” books that you downloaded through Microsoft will be deleted.
Microsoft started selling ebooks back in 2017 but tech limitations made them unpopular with users. As my colleague Alex Cranz explained back in April, anyone who bought Microsoft’s ebooks had to use Microsoft’s Edge browser and the company never made a dedicated ebook reader application. The books also came with restrictive DRM, the digital locks on media that prohibit people from sharing the files with others. Unfortunately, the existence of those same locks are the precise reason that Microsoft can pull the plug on your books remotely.
Users will automatically get refunded to whatever account they have on file, but if your credit card has expired or you don’t have a payment method stored with the company, Microsoft will give you a credit that can be used online in the Microsoft Store.
The service was such a flop I doubt Microsoft will have to issue that much in refunds, so this is really just a reminder that anything important you should have in hardcopy.
UPDATE: Link was missing before. Fixed now — sorry!
GOOD: Amy Coney Barrett Strikes a Blow against Campus Kangaroo Courts. “To put it bluntly, Judge Barrett’s opinion is a warning shot to campuses in her federal circuit — and, through persuasive authority, to campuses across the nation. Universities mix ideology and adjudication at their own peril. Yet mixing ideology and adjudication is the virtual mission statement of campus Title IX offices. Plaintiffs hunting for evidence of official hostility against men will find a target-rich environment.”
As far as I’m concerned, she can step into Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s slot whenever.
TRANSITING SUEZ: The amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge passes through the Suez Canal. The transit took place June 23. The ship is heading toward the Indian Ocean and perhaps the Persian Gulf.
ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE: A Terrorist Safe Haven is Sponsoring the Politico’s Playbook.
YOU CAN TRUST COMMUNISTS TO BE COMMUNISTS: The Chinese tested their U.S. carrier-killer missile from one of those South China Sea islands. The Washington Free Beacon’s Bill Gertz says that violates Xi Jinping’s pledge not to militarize the islands.
UGH: Facebook, YouTube Overrun With Bogus Cancer-Treatment Claims.
A Journal investigation found misinformation about cancer treatment widely available on social-media sites. The Journal spoke to dozens of oncologists, patients, lawyers, privacy experts and company representatives, and quantified the reach of several social-media accounts that promoted scientifically unvalidated cancer therapies.
As of Monday, YouTube videos viewed millions of times were among the postings advocating the use of a cell-killing, or necrotizing, ointment called black salve to treat skin cancer. Use of the ointment can inadvertently burn or kill healthy skin, and doesn’t remove cancerous growths beneath the skin, as is claimed in some videos, said David Gorski, a professor of surgery at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit who edits the blog Science-Based Medicine. The wounds could also lead to infection.
According to Dr. Gorski, misinformation about cancer on the internet is as much of a public-health issue as antivaccine misinformation. “It’s hard to argue which one is the worst,” he said.
Often the videos and social-media postings are connected with online businesses seeking to generate sales of books, supplements and unproven products.
A Facebook page with more than 60,000 likes promotes baking-soda injections and juicing regimens to treat cancer sold by a supplement salesman named Robert O. Young. Mr. Young was convicted in a San Diego County court in 2016 for practicing medicine without a license.
Caveat emptor.
